|
> I was a military dictator at heart. Not really. The mechanism of the game is intentionally made to drive the player to do this. The diplomatic system is similar to the game of Diplomacy - allies are formed and betrayed before it's formed and betrayed again, and achieving world domination at all costs is one goal of the game by design. You can also see this from various game mechanisms, such as that the player is able to adopt any of the available ideologies, even several in a row, for their material benefits alone without having real consequences, it's just a matter of weighting the pros and cons - if necessary, enforcing slavery is an option. Scientific research, cultural development, and city building remains independent from the state of peace and war, the political or economic systems (beyond some bonuses from each system). And regardless of how impoverished the life of ordinary citizens has became, the player is always the eternal dictator. In real life, if you are a Czarist regime, sooner or later it will be overthrown in the upcoming Bolshevik Revolution. Nevertheless, I guess the political system in Civilization can be alternatively interpreted as a cautious tale similar to Universal Paperclip's warning - If you give the wrong goal function - in PaperClip, to produce as many paperclips as possible, or in Civilization, to achieve world domination at all costs - and let a human or an AI overlord agent to optimize that, inevitably, humanity will suffer. |